The Most Important Social Media Stat You'll Need

Stats, stats, and more stats! With all the stats available, it’s become almost impossible to not succeed at social media if you’re checking the numbers and trends.

There’s a gift and a curse with the new wave of competition crashing over the established brands thriving on social media with little investment. The curse, of course, is that organic reach is plummeting and it’s now a necessity to invest in your marketing budget if you want your brand noticed.

The gift, however, is that Facebook has embraced its newfound identity as an advertising platform. This has led to Facebook providing page administrators with a multitude of stats they can use to identify trends that go below the surface stats, such as likes, comments, and shares.

Facebook and Twitter are especially adept at this. The two channels provide admins with exact times and dates of posts, which posts are being hidden by users, total organic and paid reach, and even tracking the times and weekdays most users visit the page.

All these insights are available at your disposal. Even better, social media channels will actually list each post’s performance in a neat and tidy Excel sheet that you can export and analyze!

ZOMG SO MUCH INFO

Perhaps all this info is too much and a tad overwhelming for social media rookies? Well, let me introduce you to a stat that’s extremely effective, useful AND easy to decipher.

Engagement Rate=Engagements/Impressions

Facebook insights will actually provide you with this in their Insights, but you have to export data to uncover the exact number of impressions and engagements a post receives.

Decoding your engagement rate on Instagram is slightly different. Simply divide the number of likes and comments on a post by your follower count. So if a page has 2,500 likes and a post receives 78 combined likes and comments, the engagement rate would be slightly over 3%.

Measuring a channel like Snapchat isn’t as easy, “as there are no native brand tools yet”, but helpful metrics are available. The platform allows users to see total unique views, total story completions, and, interestingly enough, how many screenshots are taken of your snaps.

While engagement rate for Snapchat doesn’t exist, the next best thing is completion rate. This metric allows users to establish “the percentage of people that started viewing that story compared to how many of them saw the last part of a story.”

So, why should marketers place engagement rate on a higher pedestal? For one, it allows you to properly analyze and compare the performance of posts from different channels.

We’ll use an account we run as an example where we post to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. All three channels are going to have a wide gap in the amount of impressions and engagements they receive on account of the numbers of followers they have.

With engagement rate, however, we can effectively identify which posts are successful on certain channels and eliminate the followers factor.

Since we can record an engagement rate, we can compare the responses and trends of Facebook (17K followers), Twitter (10k followers), and LinkedIn (over 70k followers), and see which channel our posts are the most engaging. Now we can carefully craft posts for each channel to get the response, because of the varying attention spans of their appropriate audiences and which type of posts they respond to best.

Those are stats that surface numbers can’t provide. If you were to simply look at the numbers, you would assume our posts just happen to be wildly successful on LinkedIn, on account of the 20K-plus impressions we receive on each post, compared to the hundreds of impressions we receive on the same Facebook and Twitter posts.

Thanks to engagement rate, we can see that people are more likely to engage with our brand on the other channels.

Engagement rate certainly isn’t the only below-the-surface stat you can utilize. Click-through rate (Clicks divided by impressions) is another excellent formula that allows you to see which links are being clicked on the most, as well as which posts are driving people to click and which channels are clicking the most per impression.

Go the extra mile when it comes to social media analyzation. The stats that can take your brand to the next level are waiting and available for your use right now!